Yellowstone grizzlies aren’t out of the woods
yet

Grizzlies and Yellowstone
— bears and geysers. People have been coming from around the
world to see the national park’s main attractions for
decades. Now, the Bush administration wants to remove the
Yellowstone grizzlies from the list of species protected by the
Endangered Species Act. I think delisting is premature, because we
need more bears, more habitat and true habitat protection to do the
job right.

Yellowstone’s grizzlies need more than
Yellowstone Park; they also need millions of acres of surrounding
national forest. This land has seen some oil and gas development as
well as logging and road-building through the years, but the big
question is what will happen in the future.

The grizzly
by nature will eat almost anything, has a long memory and is mighty
inquisitive. This is fine, except that almost all Yellowstone
grizzlies die because humans kill them. Once a bear develops a
taste for a picnic basket or unprotected human garbage, that bear
has a bullet with its name on it.

"A fed bear is a dead
bear" is how biologists put it. We have made some progress in
cleaning up our act in grizzly country, but too many bears still
meet their death because humans do something foolish.

Then there’s the problem of the bears’ slow
reproduction. It takes a female grizzly two to three years after
producing a litter to even think about mating again. Which means
that once a grizzly bear population suffers a lot of deaths, it
takes a long time for the population to rebound.

But the
issue always comes down to habitat. Are we willing to make room for
the grizzlies, or do we have a plan that asks bears to read road
signs and imaginary lines on a map? More than a third of the
habitat currently used by Yellowstone’s grizzlies gets not a
jot of protection under the government’s delisting plan. The
government wants to maintain Yellowstone’s current bear
numbers, but it won’t try to protect the more than 2 million
acres beyond the park.

How do we even know that the
government will deliver on its current, inadequate promise to
protect some of the bear’s habitat? The government claims it
can do that through Forest Service land-management plans —
the same forest plans that the Bush administration has said contain
hopeful goals, not binding commitments.

Even the habitat
the federal government assures us it will protect is unraveling.
Yellowstone’s grizzlies rely heavily on one key food source,
the seed cones of whitebark pine. In good years, whitebark pine
produces lots of seed cones, feeding the bears and keeping them in
the high country away from trouble. In years when the whitebark
pine cone production falters, grizzlies produce fewer cubs, have
many more conflicts with humans, and are killed by humans at an
unsustainable level.

Unfortunately, whitebark pine is
under attack from a foreign disease called blister rust, mountain
pine beetles and a warming climate. That orange hue increasingly
seen in Yellowstone’s forests is not a good sign for bears.
The upshot? More dead bears every year. The agencies’
response? We’ll monitor the decline of whitebark and figure
out what to do when the crash occurs.

Then there’s
the small population size of Yellowstone’s bears. Over and
over again, we’ve seen wildlife populations isolated by a sea
of development. Essentially, that means near family members begin
to breed with each other, which is never good for the long-term
health of the population. The number of grizzlies in Yellowstone is
still so small, at a loose estimate of 400 to 600 bears, that the
government plans to truck in a grizzly every 10 years to deal with
genetic inbreeding. Does this sound like success?

Did I
mention hunting? Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho have all announced
plans to hunt Yellowstone’s grizzlies, which could get under
way as soon as the bear is delisted. This would add intentional
mortalities to an already imperiled population.

Instead
of federal law protecting the grizzlies, after delisting they will
get all the protection Wyoming will give them. That’s right
— the same state that has declared war on wolves, sued to
eliminate the Clinton Roadless Rule, and pushed to pollute
Yellowstone Park with unlimited snowmobiles. Not to be outdone,
four Wyoming counties that currently host grizzlies have passed
county ordinances that say bears and wolves can be killed on sight.
You can put away that "Welcome" sign for grizzlies in Wyoming.

We’ve made progress in protecting
Yellowstone’s bears, but improvement doesn’t equal
success. Now is the time to save the grizzlies’ last
remaining habitat, while we still can.

Doug
Honnold is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the managing
attorney of the Earthjustice office in Bozeman, Montana, and has
been working to protect grizzly bears for more than 20
years.

Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].

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